William Vila He turns 70 this August 17 and, beyond his distance, his legacy continues to multiply in Argentina. Next, four reasons to understand the greatness of an idol who has compared himself with the best in the world, but transformed the reality of a sport that today would not have the same meaningboth in clubs and in the sector and, above all, in high performance, without his fundamental contribution.

on Olympus

There are no big arguments when it comes to placing Guillermo Vilas in the status of the greatest Argentine athletes in history. There is something for various tastes, of course: you can talk about Diego Maradona, Lionel Messi, Mario Kempes, Emanuel Ginóbili and the signatures follow.

But what makes Vilas a unique case in that Olympus is that, unlike his “colleagues” of greatness, who emerged from sport with a greater popular insertion and a greater tradition at a high level, a whole phenomenon has been generated around him. his.

Tennis as an industry, tennis as a massive activity (which has come out of a circle for the whole country), tennis to incorporate women into the sporting public, tennis as a high-performance phenomenon that has been projected for several generations .

From that moment in the 1970s to almost today when, with the typical ups and downs of every sport, Argentina has at times become an international power. Y Vilas was the model on which those generations followed. which made our audience vibrate so much with conquests, up to leading to the long-awaited Davis Cup in Zagreb.

The symbol of an era

A man – adolescent, young, mature – always careful to grasp the cultural pulse of every era, Vilas symbolized the reconversion of tennis (national and international) from a “traditionalist” sport to another that has made the course as a professional structure.

We refer to the “crazy” 70s, the years of Bjorn Borg, Jimmy Connors and Guillermo Vilas as dominant names in the foreground. But in the case of the Argentine he is also associated with the new waves of fashion and glamor – goodbye to the untouchable white -, with the society between tennis players and musicians (preferably rock) and even with different cultural manifestations.

In the course of history, there have been many moments in which tennis has occupied the front pages in the sports field, but it is since the 70s that it has had a universal extension.

The duels between those phenomena (and also the personalities of Ilie Nastase, Adriano Panatta, Vitas Gerulaitis, John McEnroe and many others) made the tennis of the 70s and early 80s a more palatable, exciting game (beyond the technical questions that deserve to be separate chapters).

the lord of the archives

In tennis and in all sports, all records, even the most surprising, are there to be broken. We don’t know if Vilas was obsessed with some of the records he achieved, since his goal was to become the best tennis player possible and win Grand Slam titles, two conditions that really define a tennis player’s worth.

Of course, many of his grades have already been passed. Not so his astonishing 1977 season, when he won 46 consecutive games – or 50 if you include Rye’s semi-official tournament – and only recently succumbed to Nastase and his quickly banned double-rope racket on the clay court of Aix. -en- Provence.

But he quickly won another 26 games, only stopping in the January Masters semifinal against Borg at Madison Square Garden. That streak remains an unbeatable record. And the whole cycle of that season is worthy of putting it on a par with the exploits of these contemporary Big 3 phenomena. We speak, of course, of Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic. At your height.

In any case, the comparisons are misleading: neither technically nor physically, the tennis of the 70s / 80s is linked to today, some might even consider it two different sports. Not only have the regulations and calendars changed, but also the technology available to the tennis player (rackets, clothing and accessories) and the physical preparation systems, which in recent times are experiencing a real revolution in all sports.

an innovator

Largely by vocation and partly by intuition, Vilas was the initiator of aspects that have since been common in high-competition tennis.

He was one of the first to do so adopted a full time coachlike Borg with Lennart Bergelin, although at that time the function of the companion was total: coach, general manager, travel agent, head of public relations, among many other functions.

Today there are teams accompanying the elite player, but the truth is that Vilas’ duo with Romanian Ion Tiriac was an originality in his day. As well as his diets, his strenuous and rigorous physical preparation sessions – today they take less time and are more “tuned” – and his meticulous pursuit of technical perfection.